Sunday, December 31, 2017

Alfredo Serrano
Mancilla, a Spanish economist who has served as an advisor to the Maduro
Government, has published an article that has been extensively shared in social
networks.

The article is titled “The
Evidence of the Economic Crime against Venezuela” and begins with a well-known
conspiracy theory rhetorical formula: most analysts are either blind or have consciously
chosen to ignore the evidence of a wide spread conspiracy. In this case, the
evidence of the “continued economic aggression Venezuela has suffered during
the last years.”

The purpose of
Serrano’s article is therefore to lay out the “manifest proofs” of the “constant
harassment” the Venezuelan economy has suffered. These are:

1. Country Risk:
according to Serrano the low credit rates given to Venezuela by credit rating
agencies are inappropriate, given the “fact” that Venezuela has always honored
it debt.

2. Default
terminology: The word “default” is inappropriately used in the Venezuelan case.
News agencies have used the term “selective default” to signify late payments
by the Venezuelan government. This is evidence, for Serrano, that “remarks against
Venezuela do not follow criteria of economic rationality.”

3. Trump: Us President’s
executive order has to be read “in detail to realize that it is an explicit boycott”
of the Venezuelan economy.

4. Blockade by the
international financial system: According to Serrano, Citibank, Comerzbank, and
Deutsche Bank, among other international financial institutions, have barred
Venezuela from international funds.

5. Blockade of food
and basic products: A by-product of the previous point, Venezuela’s payment for
imports has been turned back and this has limited the countries access to basic
imported goods. The recent pork
import scandal, which the Maduro government blamed on Portugal for not
sending the Christmas perniles
Venezuela had allegedly payed for, is not included in Serrano’s article.

6. Black Market Dollar:
the “parallel illegal exchange” rate of the local currency does not have,
according to Serrano a real “‘parallel’ with any macroeconomic variable.” It is
in reality, “a political weapon of economic destruction, used to induce an
inordinate increase of inflation.”

“Reality is
undisputable,” closes Serrano his article, “no other country is being subjected
to an economic siege of such high intensity and persistency.”

Thursday, December 7, 2017

Venezuela’s government
media has been explaining how the Petro, the new “crypto currency”
announced by president Maduro, will help the country fight the “economic war” being
waged against the Bolivarian Revolution and its accomplishments.

The Centro deInvestigaciones en Procesos Económicos Entrópicos (CIPEE), has
published an article in
Aporrea showing what it claims is a correlation between the black market
price of the Bolivar Fuerte, as reported
by the web portal DolarToday, and Bitcoin.

The CIPEE does not
have a webpage, put a Google search leads to a previous article published in the
pro-government website Ensartaos.
“Profoundly worried by our nation’s destiny,” says the CIPEE, “we have decided
to issue a preliminary study about the disturbed and threatened state of the
Venezuelan economy. In this brief analysis we will show the interference with
the Venezuelan economy by (web)portals which list the illegal Dollar, such as
DolarToday and BolivarCucuta. Our aim is to scientifically proof (…) that the
macroeconomic variables of our country have no relationship with the invention
created by wise (sesudos) formal
economists.”

This brief analysis announced
by the CIPEE includes a “Psychological factor” called by the authors “the
stupidity gene”, a metaphor for the fact that “the Cuarta República (the governments before Chávez), imbedded our
people with a ‘gene’ of inferiority and of lack of human and moral value (minusvalía) vis-à-vis the rest of the
world, this made us one of the most insecure humans in the planet,” and
therefore made us think that our currency is worth less that other’s.

The second part of CIPEE’s analysis seems to be the article published by Aporrea, showing the
correlation between the black market Dollar and Bitcoin. This correlation forces
the authors to ask important (not yet answered) questions, such as: “Has the artificially
inflated value of the Dollar in Venezuela influenced in a significant way the behavior
of Bitcoin? (…) Is Bitcoin the Trojan horse by which DolarToday aspires to make
the Venezuelan economy implode as soon the speculative bubble bursts? Is the
Petro the answer by president Maduro to make the effect of bitcoin (…) disappear...?

“We will have to
continue our investigations…” is the final line of the article. That’s great
news for this Blog.

Monday, December 4, 2017

The confessions of
Bill Oxley, an alleged retired CIA agent, are being treated as fake-news by
several outlets. According to onlinethreatalerts.com:

“Be aware of
fake-news websites that have published the article "I Killed Bob Marley -
CIA Agent Confesses On Deathbed." The article is a fake because the man in
it which they claim is Bill Oxley, a 79-year-old retired officer of the CIA who
allegedly killed Bob Marley, is actually a photo model who works for a Polish
microstock photography company.”

Venezuelan government
media is however presenting the news as fact. Below is the reposted article
from Correo
del Orinoco. The “source” of the news quoted by the Correo del Orinoco is the web page of Diosdado Cabello’s TV show Con
el Mazo Dando; which quotes as its source for the Spanish version the
article the web page dothereggae.com;
which quotes the article in English from thebreakingtimes.com.

The Venezuelan
version of the article does add a final cautionary paragraph explaining that: “For
the time being we cannot know for sure if the story is true, as most stories that
are told, and as you, know this has been one of the greatest conspiranoias of Reggae, and this is why
we considered that you [the reader] should know about it. But it is true that
Bunny Wailer has talked about this on several occasions (…). We can only hope
that one day the whole truth will be known…”

Friday, September 22, 2017

President Maduro does
not claim there is a plot to assassinate him as often as his predecessor did.
This week however, Maduro directly accused opposition leader and president of
the National Assembly, Julio Borges, of being “implicated” in an assassination
plot against him.

“An order has been issued
to assassinate the president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and that
order comes from the Oval Office, and Julio Borges is implicated in this
outrage with all his unlimited cynicism, with his unlimited immorality,” said
Maduro.

The president
provided no evidence for his claims, but he had declared on August 19 that US
president Trump’s declarations about Venezuela implied a direct threat to his
life. According
to Maduro:

“The threats made
today by Trump, I know how to exactly interpret them: Donald Trump has threatened
to kill the President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, (…) but I tell
him that if something happened to me, they would regret it for a hundred years,
because the people would rise against imperialism.”

“Evidence” of Borge’s
part in the plot is provided by the Agencia
Venezolana de Noticias (AVN). According to AVN, the position leader is “one
of the main promoters of an interventionist campaign against Venezuela. In the
last weeks he has met several US government high officials to ask for an assault
(arremetida) against the fatherland.”

AVN also cites a previous
two coup magnicidio plot claims made by
the government as evidence for the current plot: The Carpeta
Amarilla (2014), and the Blue
Coup plots (2015, also known as the Jericho
Operation). No evidence has ever surfaced for those two previous plots.

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

For several years on
the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Venezuelan government sponsored Telesur
has published a piece explaining the “many questions that still linger about
the attack.” (See
here my post of previous years.)

This year’s article
by Telesur is mainly about Scholars for 9/11
Truth, (From its webpage: “Scholars for 9/11 Truth is a non-partisan association of faculty,
students, and scholars, in fields as diverse as history, science, military
affairs, psychology, and philosophy, dedicated to exposing falsehoods and to
revealing truths behind 9/11.

” A spin-off of the group publishes the Journal of 9/11 studies. In the
next months Aposta, Revista de Ciencias Sociales will publish a piece by me, in
Spanish, featuring a detailed analysis of back issues of the journal up to
2014.)

The author writes
that the United States “seems destined by nature to be plagued with misery by
nature acting in the name of justice with devastating hurricanes that are drowning
its economy, as punishment for the immoral and illegal sanctions with which
they [The US] hope to drown the Venezuelan economy.”

Mena Cifuentes also argues
that the punishment the United States is currently receiving is connected to
the 9/11 attacks. According to the author: “Noted scientists, experts in
accidents and explosives, and journalists, several of whom have died in “strange”
accidents, others in exchanges with the police, have attributed the genocide
[of 9/11] to the Yankee government, who used it as a pretext to fight against terrorism
and to unleash against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria,
wars to take over their oil, like they are doing today against Venezuela.”

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Except for magnicidio plot claims, president Maduro’s
press conference yesterday was a compendium of most of the conspiracy theories proposed
by the Venezuelan government in the past years. The Empire was the main object of Maduro’s claims about destabilization
attempts against his government, which he called a state of “permanent
conspiracy.” But also local opposition leaders and other regional governments
were included in the plots.

The economic war
theory featured prominently. The United States was accused of promoting a “financial
and economic blockade” of the country. “Nobody has the right to try to impose
his policies with threats, pressures, sanctions, and economic, financial,
political, diplomatic, and much less military aggressions. Venezuela claims its
right to peace, independence, and self-determination,” said
Maduro. He added that even though 86% of Venezuelans rejected a US
intervention in the country, this possibility is supported by the opposition
leadership: “Only they back this threat, which they have sanctified, and they
have gone out of the country to ask for an economic and financial blockade
against Venezuela.”

International media
was also accused by Maduro of being part of this “permanent conspiracy.”
The BBC was particularly singled out by the president as the media outlet
behind what he called “an imperialist aggression of world-wide nature,” of
which the BBC has become “the biggest propaganda apparatus.” He added that “since
the war in Iraq, the BBC had not played such a disgusting [asqueroso] role.”

Most interesting of
yesterday’s conference was that Maduro provided a theory of three
interlinked coup plots backed by the United States against his government,
financed and coordinated via Miami and Bogotá, and enacted by local opposition
leaders:

“There is a permanent
conspiracy from Miami against Venezuela. All those captured after the attack against
the Paramacay fort have confessed,
and we know of their links and finances. Another group [of plotters] is related
to the old coupist military of 2002, which have fled the country. And another
group belongs to the incorrectly called Blue
Coup, even if most of them are in jail, they are still trying to make
noise. These three groups have been activated by them [United States] with a
lot of many, but the Venezuelan armed forces have developed very effective
anti-coup strategies.”

Despite the “evidence”
presented by Maduro of these coup plots, he also said he would be writing a
letter to US President Trump asking for conversations. “Trump and I have to
talk, because we don’t want our people to suffer, we have to co-exist in peace.
We are anti-imperialists and anti-colonialists, but we are not against the
United States, we love the people of the United States,” said Maduro.

(Read previous posts on
the Paramacay Fort incident here
and here, and on the Blue Coup here,
here,
and here.
Even though Maduro spoke against the term Blue
Coup, it was widely used by government officials and state media at the
time. The Agencia Venezolana de Noticias yesterday
ran a note explaining the links between the three coup plots under the title “Groups
managed from abroad have attacked the rule of law in Venezuela.”)

Saturday, August 12, 2017

“We have many options
for Venezuela, including a possible military option if necessary” said US President
Trump last night. “We have troops all over the world in places that are very
far away. Venezuela is not very far away and people are suffering and they’re
dying,” he added.

It’s unlikely that Trump’s
declarations will be followed by an imminent invasion of Venezuela, but they
are sure to boost the anti-imperialist and nationalist rhetoric of the Venezuelan
government. The declarations will be presented as part of a “coordinated” hemispheric
plan led by the US government, and backed by other “rightist” governments in
the region and the local opposition, to put an end to the Bolivarian revolution
and its “accomplishments”.

These are the first
reactions by several government officials to President Trump’s declarations:

Defense Minister Vladimir
Padrino López told Venezolana de
Televisión: “This is an act of craziness, and act of extremism. There is extremist
elite now governing the United States.”

Information and
Communication Minister Ernesto Villegas, has said that the Venezuelan Foreign
Minister will issue and official communique later today. He wrote on Twitter:

.@DrodriguezVen: We reject the cowardly, insolent, and vile threats from US President @realDonaldTrump against the sacred sovereignty of VenBoth Rodríguez and
Villegas re-twitted this response by Argentinian pro-chavista philosopher Fernando Buen Abad D.:

Thursday, August 10, 2017

On August 6, 1945, in
Hiroshima an atomic bomb killed at least 90,000 people, perhaps as many as
146,000. On August 6, 2017, an armed group of at least 18 attacked
the military fort of Paramacay in the Venezuelan city of Valencia. After a
gun battle that lasted for three hours, two of the attackers were dead and 10
had been detained, according to the government. The rest of the attacker fled
after stealing a cache of guns form the fort.

To even suggest a
comparison between these two events may seem tasteless to most. Not so to the Agencia Bolivariana de Noticias (AVN)
and its main conspiracy theorist-in-residence Hernán Mena Cifuentes (previous mentions
of him on this blog can be read here
and here.)

Mena Cifuentes’s
latest piece From
the Hiroshima Genocide to paramilitary terrorism in Paramacaysuggests
that “There are crimes against humanity, such as the ones perpetrated on August
6 in Hiroshima 72 years ago, and on August 6, 2017, in Paramacay Fort,
Valencia, that remain, not only in the collective memory of the people of the
countries where they were committed, but also in the whole world, the footprint
of the barbaric fascist terrorism on its grim march of violence, destruction
and death.”

“Prohibido Olvidar”
is the motto with which Mena Cifuentes closes his article.

Thursday, August 3, 2017

After Venezuela’s
electoral authority the Consejo Nacional
Electoral (CNE) announced
on June 31 that 8,089,320 people had voted on elections the previous day for
the new Constitutive Assembly, the opposition immediately cried foul. Participation
levels were important as the opposition refused to participate in the
elections. The opposition argued that the participation in the elections had
not reached 3 million. But the only evidence that the CNE had conspired with
the Executive to inflate the participation numbers were images
of empty voting centers, and previous polls
that showed that more that 80% of likely voters rejected a new Constitutive
Assembly.

Since yesterday the claims
by the opposition have suddenly received very strong support from Smartmatic,
the e-voting company that has provided technical support in 14 of the last elections
in Venezuela, including the June 30 Constitutive Assembly elections. Indeed,
Smartmatic was accused by sectors of the opposition in previous elections of
not revealing successive “elections frauds” in Venezuela. But now the company seems
willing to do just that.

In a statement
read in London by Smartmatic director Antonio Mugica, and first reported
by the BBC, the company said it could not vouch for the results provided by the
CNE: “Based on the robustness of our system, we know, without any doubt, that
the turn out of the recent election for a National Constituent Assembly was
manipulated. It is important to highlight that similar manipulations are made
in manual elections in many countries, but because of the lack of electronic
security and auditing safeguards, they go unnoticed.” Mugica also said
that there was discrepancy of “at least a million votes” between Smartmatic
data and what the CNE had reported.

Also yesterday Girish
Gupta, Reuters’ correspondent in Caracas, reported that
according to CNE internal data, only 3.7 million people had voted by 5:30. The
polls closed at 7:00 and political analyst Jennifer McCoy told Gupta: "Although
it's possible to have a late push at the end of the day, and the Socialist
Party has tried to do that in the past, to double the vote in the last hour and
a half would be without precedent."

And now it is of
course the government, and government media, hinting at Smartmatic being part
of a broad right-wing imperial conspiracy to discredit the election’s results.
The main
argument exposed by government media is that Smartmatic is contradicting
itself by claiming its systems are robust and that electoral results cannot be
changed. However Smartmatic claims that its systems are as robust as ever, but
that the CNE ignored the control and auditing safeguards this time around, and simply
reported a different result.

The head of the CNE,
Tibisay Lucena, gave a press
conference yesterday afternoon. She said that what has been said by
Smartmatic amounts to “an opinion by a company whose only role in the electoral
process is to provide services and technical support, which do not determine
the results. These declarations [by Smartmatic] have been made in the context
of a permanent aggression against the CNE.”

“It is not a private
company, located outside the country who guarantees the transparency and
credibility of Venezuela’s electoral system. Antonio Mugica says the differences
between what was announced and what the system provided were a million votes,
that is and irresponsible and groundless assertion,” added Lucena.

After Lucena’s press
conference, the Mayor of Caracas and top PSUV leader, Jorge Rodríguez, declared
that if it were not for “the violent acts of the fascist”, 10 million would
have turned out to vote in the elections. Asked by reporters if the PSUV would ask
for an audit of the process, he said that chavismo
would not “play the oppositions game.”

President Maduro has
announced that the newly elected Constitutive Assembly will be stablished
this Friday, in the nation’s Capitol, where the National Assembly meets. Maduro
called Smartmatic’s director Antonio Mugica “stupid” and said that “this
electoral process cannot be tainted by anything because it is transparent.”

Maduro also
hinted at possible future solution to Venezuela´s economic troubles: he
will summon the members of the Constitutive Assembly elected from the “business
sector” to Miraflores presidential palace, where they will meet with him every
day and advise him on economic decrees to defeat the “economic unconventional
war waged by sectors of the opposition.”

“I would like for you
(business sector representatives) to form a powerful economic commission that
will go to Miraflores every day to issue permanent economic decrees until we
recover that economy of the country,” explained the President.

Here is an image
published yesterday by Telesur explaining Smatmatic’s “contradictions”:

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

During the plebiscite
organized by the Venezuelan opposition on July 16, a group of suspected pro-government
armed groups attacked
one of the voting centers in plaza Catia, Caracas. As a result of the attack
one woman died and at least three more people were wounded.

President Maduro has
hinted at the possibility that the “US Department of State and Donald Trump”
could be behind the attack in Catia. His suspicions are based on the second
paragraph of a press
release published by the Department of States on July 17, a day after the plebiscite.

“…we condemn the loss
of life in Catia, Caracas and deplore the violence. We call on the Venezuelan
government to bring the attackers to justice,” says the second paragraph of the
statement.

“This is a very
delicate and strange paragraph in this statement,” explained
Maduro, “we are now investigating the reason for this second paragraph.
Donald Trump and the Department of State concerned with Catia? What is this
about? (…) What importance could plaza Catia have had for the failed imperialist
strategy?”

“How far can a
conspiracy go in preparing false flags (falsos
positivos) and massacres? How far does the hand of the US embassy reach
into the massacre attempts that have been staged in Venezuela in the last one hundred
days?” Maduro also asked.

To answer these
questions the president has asked Venezuela’s “highest authorities” to mount a
full investigation “in order to concentrate our efforts, and to integrate all
the institutions, in the task of clearing this strange and unique expression in
the second paragraph by the Department of State, naming plaza Catia.”

President Maduro has
announced a new “Special Plan of Emergency Justice” for the “search and
capture conspirators.” The announcement was made during a televised session of
the Council for the Defense of the Nation (Codena), which was declared in “permanent
sessions” by the government in order to “face the imperial threat” against the
country.

The plan, according
to Maduro, is the brain child of Maikel Moreno, President of Venezuela’s
highest court, the Tribunal Supremo de
Justicia (TSJ), and will involve several state security agencies, including
“military justice, police institutions, the Interior Minister,” and the
recently appointed by the TSJ, pro-government vice-attorney general, Katherine
Harrinton.

Tuesday, July 4, 2017

This video by Telesur’s Madelein Garcia (@madeleintlSUR) surpasses most of what has been reported in this blog. It begins with the revelation that “43 symbols written in Hebrew” have been found painted along the main opposition protests routes in Caracas. An “expert” interviewed by Garcia explains that the symbol roughly mean “I stand here” which, the expert says, is a symbol used by “Masonic”, “Zionist”, and “other US organization to harm governments that work in the service of their people.” Garcia further explains that the places in which the symbols have been found could indicate evacuation routes, meeting places for “terrorist gatherings,” or even an the invasion route to be used by foreign forces.

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

What we
know so far of yesterday’s confusing incident is that a group of agents of the
CICPC (intelligence police) flew a police helicopter over the buildings of the Venezuela’s
Supreme Justice Tribunal and Interior Minister. Several shots were fired at the
buildings from the helicopter and at least one grenade was thrown. No injuries
were reported.

The helicopter had
been commandeered by Oscar
Pérez and a group of at least four more officers. Pérez published a video
explaining that his aim was to “return power to the democratic people.”

The government is
also being accused of conspiracy. Some opposition supporters expressed via
social networks their suspicions that the actions could have been staged by the
government as an excuse for further militarization and repression. Francisco
Toro of Caracas Chronicles hypothesized that the event could be a “false
flag” by the government: “(Oscar Perez’s) video looks like a two-bit parody of
what an underpaid TeleSUR intern thinks the opposition looks and sounds like

,” wrote Toro. However he concluded that he
leans more to Pérez being a “random lunatic”.

The government
however was quick to alert of an unfolding coup attempt. On early evening,
president Maduro
said on television that the event had been a “terrorist attack” and that
the armed forces would be deployed in full to stop the coup.

The Ministry of Information
issued
a statement saying that the event was part of “an escalation of a coup
against the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and its
institutions.” Oscar Pérez, says in the statement, “is under investigation for
his links with the CIA and the United States Embassy in Caracas, and for his
links with an ex-minister of Interior (of Venezuela), who has recently
publically confirmed his contacts with the CIA.”

The “ex-minister of
Interior” mentioned is Miguel
Rodríguez Torres, who said in a news conference that he in fact had had
contacts with the CIA as Chavez’s Interior Minister and under his orders. “When
I was the director of the intelligence services, president Chávez told me that
we should have the best relations with all the other intelligence services of
the world, including the CIA,” said
Rodríguez Torres.

Here is the transcription
made by Telesur of the statement read by Information Minister Ernesto Villegas
yesterday (the statement has not yet been published in the MINCI web page):